Hogen - Making Sense of Japanese Dialects

The other day, a girl in one of my classes exclaimed: “Sahshii!”, which caused another girl to make a quizzical look and ask, “What on earth does that mean?” With half of the class coming from outside Fukuoka Prefecture, this sort of thing happens from time to time: one of the girls will speak in the dialect she has grown up only to be greeted with either blank stares or derisive laughter.

“Sahshii!” means urusai (煩い, 五月蝿い, literally “May flies”), which is standard Japanese for “noisy”, “troublesome”, or “persistent”. Another common word is yakamashii (喧しい) can also mean “noisy”, as well as “up in arms” and “raising a clamor” or “strict” and “finicky, picky”. Lucky for my students, I am neither urusai or yakamashii. I wish I could say the same about them.

A note about the following: while some prefectures may use the same word or phrase, the way they say it will vary greatly due to the altered intonation.